A third industrial revolution - MIT

1 Apr 21st 2012 | from the print editionSpecial report: Manufacturing and innovationIn this special reportA third industrial revolutionBack to making stuffThe boomerang effectForging aheadSolid printLayer by layerAll together nowMaking the futureSources & acknowledgementsReprintsA third industrial revolutionAs manufacturing goes digital, it will change out of allrecognition, says Paul Markillie. And some of the businessof making things will return to rich countriesOUTSIDETHESPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs, a third industrial revolution | The of 54/19/12 2:13 PMstands the Hammering Man , a 21-metre kinetic statue that steadilyraises and lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a Borofsky, the artist who built it, says it is a celebration of theworker using his mind and hands to create the world we live in.

2 That isa familiar story. But now the tools are changing in a number ofremarkable ways that will transform the future of of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which showsmachines for making prototypes of products, the tools needed to putthose things into production and all manner of other manufacturing engineers worked with lathes, drills, stamping presses andmoulding machines. These still exist, but EuroMold exhibits no oilymachinery tended by men in overalls. Hall after hall is full ofsqueaky-clean American, Asian and European machine tools, all highlyautomated.

3 Most of their operators, men and women, sit in front ofcomputer screens. Nowhere will you find a at the most recent EuroMold fair, last November, another group ofmachines was on display: three-dimensional (3D) printers. Instead ofbashing, bending and cutting material the way it always has been, 3 Dprinters build things by depositing material, layer by layer. That is whythe process is more properly described as additive manufacturing. AnAmerican firm, 3D Systems, used one of its 3D printers to print ahammer for your correspondent, complete with a natty wood-effecthandle and a metallised is what manufacturing will be like in the future.

4 Ask a factory todayto make you a single hammer to your own design and you will bepresented with a bill for thousands of dollars. The makers would have toproduce a mould, cast the head, machine it to a suitable finish, turn awooden handle and then assemble the parts. To do that for onehammer would be prohibitively expensive. If you are producingthousands of hammers, each one of them will be much cheaper, thanksto economies of scale. For a 3D printer, though, economies of scalematter much less. Its software can be endlessly tweaked and it canmake just about anything.

5 The cost of setting up the machine is thesame whether it makes one thing or as many things as can fit inside themachine; like a two-dimensional office printer that pushes out one letteror many different ones until the ink cartridge and paper need replacing,it will keep going, at about the same cost for each third industrial revolution | The of 54/19/12 2:13 PMAdditive manufacturing is not yet good enough to make a car or aniPhone, but it is already being used to make specialist parts for cars andcustomised covers for iPhones.

6 Although it is still a relatively youngtechnology, most people probably already own something that wasmade with the help of a 3D printer. It might be a pair of shoes, printedin solid form as a design prototype before being produced in bulk. Itcould be a hearing aid, individually tailored to the shape of the user sear. Or it could be a piece of jewellery, cast from a mould made by a 3 Dprinter or produced directly using a growing number of additive manufacturing is only one of a number of breakthroughsleading to the factory of the future, and conventional productionequipment is becoming smarter and more flexible, too.

7 Volkswagen hasa new production strategy called Modularer Querbaukasten, or MQB. Bystandardising the parameters of certain components, such as themounting points of engines, the German carmaker hopes to be able toproduce all its models on the same production line. The process is beingintroduced this year, but will gather pace as new models are launchedover the next decade. Eventually it should allow its factories in America,Europe and China to produce locally whatever vehicle each don t make them like that any moreFactories are becoming vastly more efficient, thanks to automatedmilling machines that can swap their own tools, cut in multipledirections and feel if something is going wrong, together with robotsequipped with vision and other sensing systems.

8 Nissan s British factoryin Sunderland, opened in 1986, is now one of the most productive inEurope. In 1999 it built 271,157 cars with 4,594 people. Last year itmade 480,485 vehicles more than any other car factory in Britain,ever with just 5,462 people. You can t make some of this modern stuff using old manual tools, saysColin Smith, director of engineering and technology for Rolls-Royce, aBritish company that makes jet engines and other power systems. Thedays of huge factories full of lots of people are not there any more.

9 As the number of people directly employed in making things declines,the cost of labour as a proportion of the total cost of production willA third industrial revolution | The of 54/19/12 2:13 PMdiminish too. This will encourage makers to move some of the workback to rich countries, not least because new manufacturing techniquesmake it cheaper and faster to respond to changing local materials being used to make things are changing as composites, for instance, are replacing steel andaluminium in products ranging from mountain bikes to airliners.

10 Andsometimes it will not be machines doing the making , but micro-organisms that have been genetically engineered for the in the factories of the future will be run by smarter in manufacturing will have a disruptive effect every bit asbig as in other industries that have gone digital, such as officeequipment, telecoms, photography, music, publishing and films. And theeffects will not be confined to large manufacturers; indeed, they willneed to watch out because much of what is coming will empower smalland medium-sized firms and individual entrepreneurs.